Maths day adds up to a whole lot of fun for children

Karen Dunn

With their SATs out of the way, youngsters at Farlington School turned their attention to a fun maths day.

There were puzzles galore at the school, in Guildford Road, as the youngsters learned that maths is not just about adding and subtratcing,

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The theme for the day was ‘squares’ and nursery children used brightly coloured squares to design pictures while the girls in the reception year looked at symmetry and pattern.

In Year 1, the children found out about the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, whose best-known works had a very mathematical air, made up of lines and rectangles.

The Year 2 children worked on Chinese tangram puzzles – seven geometric shapes that linked together to form a square, while in Year 3, the day was all about building structures from squares. The classroom was soon filled with some extrememly tall towers.

You can’t study squares on a maths day without looking at square numbers – and that task fell to the pupils in Year 4. Over in Year 5, the day was all about solving Sudoku puzzles and playing human noughts and crosses.

Year 6 was set the task of finding out how many squares there are on a chessboard – and for anyone thinking ‘well, it’s clearly 64’, you need to think again!

A school spokesman said: “The whole day was a huge success and the children were really enthusiastic about it all, showing that maths at Farlington isn’t all about tests and number crunching.”

The day was organised by Sara Povey, deputy head of prep school.

She said: “At Farlington we believe that maths is a wonderfully rich subject. Success is all to do with having the confidence to ‘have a go’ and we used our activities to enthuse our pupils and show them that maths is challenging, but very enjoyable, too.”

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